Yeah, i agree, this also avoids more conflicts between MN and miners
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I’m a ZCoin early adopter (firsts days).
Why I chose ZCoin ?
At this time, in private currencies there were only Monero and Dash.
- Monero was already showing its technical limits.
- Dash showed its limits in governance (internal quarrels, centralization…).
First I was a miner, then the masternodes arrived and I got into it too.
I bought most of my Firo when they were close to the highest, and I paid for them in bitcoin: in other words, I “lost” a lot of money given the ZCoin/Firo price drop expressed in bitcoins.
I followed the Firo team for DeFi and Dex: I put money on the ValueDefi Firo pool. The contract was emptied of its funds by a bug/hack and I had 100% loss :-(.
Beyond the financial aspects, what annoys me is that Firo does not find its audience and is overtaken by much less efficient competitors, such as ZCash for example.
What is the solution ?
I don’t know, but 2 opinions:
- As a miner and masternode owner, I’ve thought for a long time that the masternode reward is too low: so I think it needs to be increased significantly (see the posts above, maybe 65% or more).
- I think that the team disperses and sometimes spends resources unnecessarily on useless or even counterproductive projects: for example the renaming of ZCoin in Firo, the graphics contest and other related things. Remain “focus” on the importants points.
And in the end, I do not wish to criticize the team: you are doing an important job and have remained motivated for a long time: I am sure that many of us will thank you for that :-).
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We wanted to encourage community participation hence held all these contests and events to get people excited about building content about Firo. But if this proposal goes through, then all of these would be shifted responsibility towards the community fund to decide how it should be used and the core team can just focus on development and research.
I do have one question.
Which group is more critical to the security of the chain?
If an entity was going to attack Firo, what is the obvious vector for attack, and what would best mitigate that. More miners or more nodes?
Also regarding price of Firo. If demand goes up and price goes up, is the net effect more security or less?
I think ultimately it comes down to first principals. A store of value first and foremost needs to be secure. For instance who would put their money in a bank that doesn’t have a safe and other security.
Before nodes, that was clearly the realm of miners. Now the projects technology has evolved, I’m not sure how much that is still the case.
Many of us lived through a 51%. It wasn’t pretty for me. I had a node disabled for a period of time. I no longer promoted Firo (as I can’t shill what I don’t believe in) until the security from nodes came online. This is a very important, and a fundamental consideration in my opinion.
Currently the security model requires both.
Miners propose blocks, masternodes lock it in. To 51% attack the network you need to either take down the masternodes or to host enough masternodes to control the network. The former is more likely. Once you bring down the masternodes or Sybil the masternodes, then you need sufficient hashrate again to attack the chain.
There are times where the network can become vulnerable even with masternodes for example during hard forks. If not enough masternodes upgrade or fall out of sync or there’s a network partition, the masternode quorums may not form properly and therefore blocks are not chainlocked. If blocks are not chainlocked, then traditional Nakamoto consensus prevails meaning it is only the miners then providing security. So masternodes provide the security the vast majority of the time by checkpointing blocks but miners still are the ones proposing blocks and inserting transactions into them.
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I like this proposal , I Run nodes as i believe in this project long term. If there was more incentive i believe more would as well.
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As someone who runs 30 master nodes across the world and has for quite a while, it’s not cheap to run RELIABLE and global masternodes. A lot of masternode runners I’ve met run on some crap hardware and drop in and out a lot. I would really really appreciate more financial support, but I realize it’s a biased opinion. I also don’t sell my FIRO and instead save up to create a new node when the amount of aggregated FIRO reaches the required amount.
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A second point: community participation problems plague all projects. As an example, fractal governance is being used in another crypto project with a lot of success, but over time, and even with penalties for non-participation, people just do what they do best – get caught up with their actual lives and forget. Rewarding community participation is a good idea, but very very hard to track and do without dedicated resources/tools.
Finding the proper incentive system + helping people adopt FIRO in their real lives so that they can’t forget about it should be the focus. There has to be a reason to use it which is stronger and easier than the status quo. Whether this is devices, apps, etc etc, I don’t know… (I’m not creative enough to solve this)
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Wanted to share this interview I did with Dj Mines, a miner which is relevant to this discussion.
Give the man a follow too!
Hi everyone. I’ve been a Zcoin/Firo supporter and investor for almost 5 years.
I really like this idea of changing the distribution and I fully support it. I read some people want to decrease the mining rewards all the way to 10%. Other people want to create a Community fund of 25%. I don’t like either of these ideas.
Why? Because I believe it’s always better to make changes little by little. Even if we put mining rewards to 20% now, it doesn’t mean that needs to stay like that forever. We can see what happens and vote again in one year or two, to reduce them further if we believe that’s still appropriate. 1-2 years of Miners reward at 20% is going to give us a great insight to take a better decision.
Putting Miner reward to 10% right now is more risky, because blockchains are complicated and it’s impossible to predict exactly what’s gonna happen. I think taking that risk is unnecessary. Miners had 50% previously, lowering to 20% is already a very big change. Let’s do that and see what happens.
Exactly for the same reason I don’t like to make a huge Community fund, all of a sudden. This has never done before in FIRO so we don’t know for sure how it’s going to work. It could be a big waste of resources if it doesn’t work the way we expect (or we hope).
Reuben is not proposing a bigger Development fund because he’s always very cautious and politically correct. And for the right reasons. But we don’t need to do that. I think the core team is doing a fantastic job (that’s why I’m heavily invested in Firo right now), and I would like to see a bigger % in development fund. This has been tested for a very long time and I think this money is very well spent.
So… after giving my reasons, I give my proposal:
50% Masternodes
20% Dev reward
10% Community Matching Fund (can be increased in the future if the idea works well)
20% Miners (can be decreased in the future if we see it appropriate after a testing period)
Keep up the good work Reuben and core team. Go Firo!
Full disclosure: I own masternodes (and btw I never dump my MN rewards, I treasure them)
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That’s a good point. Voter apathy is a thing and that’s why maybe it should be guided by a committee to begin with instead of pure voting but there has to be some voting element to start training the community to make these decisions. Core team can advise and guide in the beginning.
I propose Firo Vote©, Firo Care© and Firo Heal©
“opportunistic mining is great because it prevents bubbles, if the price is out of control, miners will come and dump it, ensuring price stability and usability as money”
There is one flaw with this. Your idea could work with coins which have no development and are practically without change, so main price aspect is cost needed to mine it.
But Firo’s value is in huge work in development (Lelantus / Spark, Elysium).
In current situation miners get disproportionately 50% whereas team gets only 15% and masternodes 35%. As pointed above security (and instant send) is managed by masternodes, so to give 50% to miners who immediately sell is not beneficial to project.
If miners will get for example 5 or 10% instead and same amount of hash power will be there they will not be able to sell it for current low price. And they should not be able to do. If many miners will leave then for those who stays difficulty will be lower and price higher thus they will be able to continue.
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“If an entity was going to attack Firo, what is the obvious vector for attack, and what would best mitigate that. More miners or more nodes?”
Well to buy more than 50% of mining power is much more easy and cheaper then to buy more than 50% of masternodes. You will need to buy more than 4.1M Firo and such high buy demand will critically increase price and in case of attack will be hard to gain from it financially.
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my final appeal to everybody is
Let the market do its thing.
you are dedicating HUGE part of the monetary emission to vanity. That part will be spent, not hodl or speculated on, SPENT, forcefully sold, and just like any governmental spending, it will be inefficient and wasted.
You will have down pressure, that is not market driven ! On top of that you will have massive monetary emission from the MNs, the cost of production of these coins is negligible, few dollars !
Let the market do its thing.
The dev team should expand and contract based on the dev fund. Nobody is expecting miracles.
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if you would own a masternode for some years, you would known that this is just wrong. Hosting cost are low, yes, but the cost of price fluctuation can cost you tousands. so you have no idea what you are talking about, sry.
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Too bad that adds up to 110% !!!
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I am disappointed miners are seen as a problem. I have had Firo on my shortlist of projects to mine post-merge. I had planned to splt my farm up and mine projects I support the most post-Eth and Firo was literally at the top of that shortlist. Right now, I am just accumulating fiat for expansion when other miners exit the market when merge hits. So I mine Eth and sell it… I do so because I don’t support Eths future. I sell most of it and transfer some into BTC.
I solo mined Firo a bit this year and won a few blocks, but I have kept all my Firo. I was excited to be able to dive in full time on Firo once the merge hit, but it seems Firo is looking to have its own Eth moment of discarding PoW mining - not fully, but significantly.
It’s just a bummer. I think a lot of Eth miners who planned to stick around post-merge had Firo on their shortlist of project networks to support. I will now have to look carefully at the rewards of supporting the network to see if it even makes sense to spend the electricity costs during a bear market. A 60% reduction in rewards from 50% to 20% likely means zero PoW miners on Firo - at least when profitability tanks post-merge. Electric costs will eat that up in short order, so its not even about loyalty at that point. Who would run a farm at a loss? Whereas before this proposed change, the math kinda looked like Firo would be able to compete in that post-Eth world after paying electricty costs.
Sorry for long rant. I was genuinely excited about supporting Firo once this 800 lb Eth gorilla moved to PoS. Just expressing my disappointment. 
You gotta do what you gotta do. It is a business and PoW miners didn’t do enough for the project while Eth continued to be so much more profitable to mine.
My last comment here is that I came away feeling like the whole goal was to get funding for certain things away from from the 15% dev rewards and to that 15% community fund. A fair proposal would have been 35% for both miners and nodes, but I think bumping the nodes up to 50% was a way to ensure enough votes are had to get this proposal passed. Not saying that’s the reason, but that’s the impression I came away with.
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Regardless of the mining reward, the number of miners and the mining difficulty will balance out to keep mining profitable for the most skilled miners.
The reward distribution between miners and masternodes is completely free, or more exactly, it must reflect the participation of each system in the security of the network.
The bonuses if we increase the masternodes reward are:
- fewer sales of Firo by miners, therefore upward pressure on the price,
- miners are not buying Firo for their activity : then lowered their reward does not eliminate any Firo purchase, but only Firo sales,
- more purchase of Firo by increasing masternodes number,
- more Firo hold over the long term by masternode holders : less Firo sell.
The balance sheet seems to be clearly in favor of a very large increase in the masternode reward :-).
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